[Giants] Item - Winterhold (Patreon)

As Frostbearers, the giants of the Kaneqia record life events and ancestral history with rime-ink tattoos, their grave responsibilities on proud and permanent display.

Winterhold

Wondrous Item, Very Rare (Requires Attunement)

To attune to this item, you must press the rime-ink crystal to your skin throughout the Attunement process. When the Attunement is complete, the crystal melts into the ink that becomes the tattoo, which appears on the skin. If your Attunement to the tattoo ends, the tattoo vanishes, and the crystal reappears in your space.

You gain the following benefits while the tattoo is on your skin.

Ice Carver. You gain proficiency with Stonecarver's Tools. When you make ability checks to carve ice, you can roll 1d6 and add it to the result.

Winterhold. You have Resistance to Cold damage. Additionally, when you successfully hit, grapple, or shove a creature with an Unarmed Strike, you deal 1d6 Cold damage to it. You can deal this damage only once per turn.

Flash Freeze. You can invoke the rune to cast a level 4 Burning Hands spell from this tattoo (save DC 17), dealing Cold damage instead of Fire and freezing open water instead of burning objects. Once used, this property can't be used again until the next dawn.

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Giants Wake. This tattoo gains the following improvements while your size is larger than Medium:

Large. The dice used for this tattoo's ice carving check bonus, Unarmed Strike, and Burning Hands spell become d8s instead of d6s.

Huge or Gargantuan. The dice used for this tattoo's ice carving check bonus, Unarmed Strike, and Burning Hands spell become d10s instead of d6s.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

Not many items benefit the Monk or Unarmed Strikes, so this item was an attempt to diversify the catalog. The rime-ink (and its crystal form) were invented as a way to magically handle reversible tattoo ink without it being as weird as the way D&D did it, which was something like "the ink is stored in the needle."

Both the item and the lore informed each other during this development. The Frost Giants (in this setting, anyway, which also by the way, Kaneqia was first mentioned in Implements of the Night five years ago) are a community of master artisans, mainly sculptors who beget new life from massive blocks of ice. The rime-ink they use for their tattoos, enchanted with the magic of ice and giants, tell tales of their lives, their past, and their ancestors. Sort of standard as far as setting design goes, but I wasn't planning to do anything too weird with arguably the third most common Giant in D&D.

This item is Very Rare, meaning it's suited for Tier 3 play (levels 11-16). It compares most similarly to the Frost Brand, which also grants a Resistance to a common damage type and deals an extra 1d6 Cold damage. Assuming maximum combat usage (by a Monk or other), this damage is still limited to 1/turn (unlike Frost Brand allowing one per hit combing with Extra Attack), allowing the power value to transfer to a 1/Day cast of Burning Hands but at 4th level, which roughly equals the amount of damage that would otherwise be dealt (6d6 to 9d6 Cold damage). The Stonecarver benefit is a total ribbon ability used mainly for roleplay and doesn't contribute to its power. Therefore, Very Rare is appropriate here.

The Giants Wake features lets this item combo with size increases, which is perfect for this theme. The benefits are marginal, dealing perhaps +5 damage over the course of one battle. It was also originally meant to deal damage over time to Grappled enemies (hence Winterhold), but the changes to 2024 5.5e meant Grappling was already punishing and very easy to accomplish by Monks, so that was scrapped in favor of something simpler.

The visual look of the item was already in consideration during mechanical development. The rime-ink crystal sealed the design goal and intent. I knew that a lighter blue icy palette would contrast well against darker skin. I don't often do anatomy let alone darker skin tones, so this was great practice. It was actually very difficult to find references for arms because there were so many AI-generated images of people. The process is getting closer to a process I wanted to try, which is to further hard-bake the sketchy lines and base colors into one layer, which required more acknowledgement of letting go of certain fine details. This is one of the few pieces in which the linework is still visible.

The ice was the most difficult part mainly because I had forgotten how to render ice and also because it had to hit a very difficult balance of translucency against the hand silhouette. At some point I tried a fist, but the claws were a more striking look. In the end I iterated and shuffled the edges of the ice around until they looked kind of right, using a combination of opaque white highlights, translucent green subsurface scattering, and dark opaque blue shadows until it worked.

The patterns and sigil were inspired by the Nordic spectrum of the Giants visual design language, hence the many braids/weaves and runic symbology, including the cheeky Yggdrasil. I didn't want to just use Nordic patterns directly, so I invented a couple to keep it more unique.